Morning Low

Pareene is out with his annual hack-list. He includes MSNBC among his targets, and the insights are sprinkled throughout. My faves:

MSNBC, we’re told all the time, is the liberal Fox News. That’s reductive and stupid. It isn’t. MSNBC isn’t the liberal Fox News for two very important reasons: It usually demonstrates a greater respect for the truth than Fox News, and it’s not as good as Fox News…. Lawrence O’Donnell seems to be trying to win a bet with someone that Piers Morgan isn’t the biggest asshole with his own TV show…

But it's not hard to guess which show he likes the least:

"Morning Joe" is the world’s most self-satisfied television program. It is a place where Harold Ford Jr. is treated as a person whose insights and opinions are worthy of being taken seriously. It’s a show with so little respect for its viewers that Mark Halperin is asked on to explain politics every day. "Morning Joe" is very sure that it is fun and outrageous, instead of depressing. They joke, or "joke," about how they are all drinking alcohol at work, on TV! They banter! Sometimes someone swears!

And then there's the man himself:

There’s also Joe’s titanic self-regard, best exemplified by his apparent belief that he and Michael Bloomberg would have made a successful presidential ticket. Scarborough, a moderate conservative television personality, still believes himself to be a Real Man Of The People sort of guy. But the ideology of "Morning Joe" is the ideology of the elite center, a group of people who hold opinions that are deeply unpopular on both ends of the political spectrum and who have convinced themselves that they represent a secret majority of Americans. (Or at least "Real" or "Regular" Americans.) Hence, Harold Ford.

Read the whole thing. It's pure Pareene. I had no idea that Mika got one fourteenth of Joe's pay before she found out and freaked. Puts some of the sexist banter in a new perspective.

(Photo: Joe Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski host the 'Morning Joe' show on MSNBC on April 7, 2009 in New York City. By Charles Ommanney/Getty Images.)